Instagram and WhatsApp reportedly suffered some outages in the United States and some other countries Wednesday (April 3).For a period of time Wednesday afternoon, Eastern time, Downdetector displayed 3,100 users’ reports of outages for Instagram and 17,000 for WhatsApp, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.A status page of Meta Platforms, the parent company of both Instagram and WhatsApp, said at the time that there were “major disruptions” in its ads transparency tools, according to the report.Meta did not immedi ...

Apple researchers have unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of interpreting ambiguous references and contextual cues. The system could revolutionize voice assistant interactions and potentially reshape the commerce landscape.The system, called ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), simplifies the complex process of understanding screen-based visual references into a language modeling task using large language models. It’s part of a growing number of attempts to enhance AI voic ...

Uber is expanding its Phoenix-based partnership with autonomous vehicle company Waymo.The company announced Wednesday (April 3) that it is now offering Uber Eats deliveries in the Arizona capital via Waymo vehicles.“Starting today in Phoenix, Uber Eats consumers in Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler may have their orders delivered by an autonomous vehicle,” Uber said in a news release. “Uber and Waymo are working with select merchants in the area, including local favorites like Princess Pita, Filiberto’s, and BoSa D ...

Since 2019, PYMNTS Intelligence has closely tracked the battle between the U.S.’s two top retailers, Walmart and Amazon, and each quarter we share our findings in our “Whole Paycheck Report.” As is made clear by the title of our most recent report, “New Consumer Spend Data Finds Amazon Way Ahead of Walmart,” Amazon overpowered Walmart in nearly every retail category in Q4 2023.The report, which is based on earnings reports from both companies as well as national data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau o ...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is eliminating hundreds of roles in two of its organizations as it focuses on other areas.The job cuts will impact several hundred roles in the company’s Sales, Marketing and Global Services (SMGS) organization and a few hundred in its Physical Stores Technology team, an AWS spokesperson told PYMNTS Wednesday (April 3) in an email.At the same time, AWS continues to hire and grow in other areas of its business and will try to find internal opportunities for those whose roles are bei ...

The legal dust-up between PayPal and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) over digital wallets has notched a win in PayPal’s favor.As reported this week, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that the CFPB “had no rational justification” for placing digital wallets under the rule’s “short-form” fee disclosure requirements.Per the ruling, and as PYMNTS detailed, unlike other products, “digital wallets are not primarily used to access funds or to function as a substitute checking account,” Leon ...

As it redesigns its Amazon Fresh stores, Amazon is removing its Just Walk Out technology.That technology will be replaced by the company’s smart shopping cart, the Amazon Dash Cart, Jessica Martin, Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement emailed to PYMNTS Tuesday (April 2).The company has redesigned a number of Amazon Fresh stores over the last year and has seen positive results in terms of higher customer shopping satisfaction scores and increased purchasing, Martin said.“We’ve also heard from customers t ...

Interoperability in payments — paying anyone, anywhere, no matter the network — remains a Holy Grail in payments.And interoperability is a work in progress. But bit by bit and app by app, cross-border, cross-network and cross-wallet compatibility is being forged.This week, PayPal and Venmo began offering Visa’s peer-to-peer (P2P) payment system, Visa+. The announcement built on earlier news that Astra, Brightwell, Cross River Bank and Fiserv plan to implement Visa+ APIs for their digital wallet and merchant ...

Unified commerce firm Cart.com has acquired Amify to expand its Amazon Marketplace services offering.Amify, which made a name for itself as the first “Amazon-as-a-service” company, provides merchants with Amazon optimization and advertising solutions.According to a Tuesday (April 2) news release, the acquisition will help meet rising demand from Cart.com’s roster of brands that need omnichannel software, services and logistics.“Amify enables brands selling on Amazon to optimize their presence, sales and pro ...

With brands competing for consumers’ attention, spending and loyalty on Amazon‘s increasingly crowded marketplace, it is becoming all the more important for them to carve out a niche if they want to set their offerings apart.In an interview with PYMNTS, Daniel Peled, chief revenue officer at Noogata, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based growth platform for brands on Amazon, spoke to the growing need for players in this competitive space to get specific about their market fit.“It’s getting harder and harder ...